Gallery builds tribute to forward-looking painter John Clark

John Clark may have died 25 years ago, but his paintings feel as contemporary as if they were created yesterday. The British-born Clark, whose path crossed with Calgary curator and artist Jeffrey Spalding in different stints the duo spent together at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in the late 1970s and again at the University of Lethbridge in the mid-1980s, is the subject of an exhibition of his work at C2, part of Contemporary Calgary.

John Clark may have died 25 years ago, but his paintings feel as contemporary as if they were created yesterday.

The British-born Clark, whose path crossed with Calgary curator and artist Jeffrey Spalding in different stints the duo spent together at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in the late 1970s and again at the University of Lethbridge in the mid-1980s, is the subject of an exhibition of his work at C2, part of Contemporary Calgary.

All of which raises the question: is it possible to have died 25 years ago — Clark died in 1989 at 46, from pancreatic cancer — and be considered a contemporary artist?

For Spalding, Clark’s work feels rooted more in the now than they did back when Clark created them in Halifax, Britain and Lethbridge.

“It’s not like … impressionism,” Spalding says. “These (paintings) are as funky and quirky as anything one would see right now — the themes still make them pertinent.”

That unique sensibility, coupled with a sense that Clark is a major figure in Canadian painting history — his work is part of collections at the Glenbow, National Art Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Ontario and Art Gallery of Nova Scotia — slipping from the public’s consciousness inspired Spalding to launch an extensive exhibition of Clark’s work.

Clark brought a painters’ sensibility developed in England, which blended figurative painting with a kind of cosmic conceptualism to Nova Scotia in the mid-1970s.

He honed that sensibility at Indiana University, in the American Midwest, not far from Iowa, where other painters such as David Hockney and Calgarian John Will also studied.

That was a time, says Spalding, who was an artist and instructor there, when conceptualism and abstract art were king — and painting was seriously uncool, particularly at NSCAD.

“He’s an interesting character,” says Spalding, “because he is, on the one hand, full of seriousness of purpose, and then (also) full of idiosyncratic silliness.

“In Nova Scotia,” he says, “it was about thought and sternness and terseness — and often, pushing the boundaries so that you couldn’t remotely get at what it was trying to say.

“It was artspeak at its zenith, but John wasn’t like that. He was a genuine seeker in nature.”

That clash of artistic sensibilities is evident in works Clark produced while in Nova Scotia such as Shout, which juxtaposes a brilliant orange backdrop against a cry for what appears to be help.

“Some of these works are quite joyful,” he says, “and others are strongly coloured, but they speak of existential anxiety.

“If you have lived in a place like Halifax, which is both interesting and challenging to live in — the sterileness, the greyness, and of the forebodingness of the weather, affects the kind of people who will stay there

“I’m not surprised (that) a black and white, dour, Presbyterian conceptionalism arose in Halifax — it’s like shouting out into the void: ‘Cheer up!’ Or ‘Help!’ Or ‘I’m here.’ ”

The show at C2, which features work Clark created not only in Nova Scotia but also back in England and during his three years at the University of Lethbridge, can almost be seen as representing three distinct chapters in Clark’s career, Spalding says.

There’s the existential anxiety of being a figurative painter in Nova Scotia, during the 1970s. There’s the sense of stewardship of the land from some of his British work, such as Guardian of the Valley, which evokes a strong sense of the environment; and finally, at Lethbridge, almost a spiritual bent.

Many of those paintings look to the prairie sky for inspiration, recalling, among others, the works of Matisse, Van Gogh, and particularly Philip Guston.

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